Wonders Never Cease (Part Two of the Anderson saga)

Chapter 2

Saints and Angels

My mother lies on her back in the ten-by-twelve foot master bedroom listening to religious programming coming from an old radio and making strange swallowing sounds. I’ve stopped going in there lately and I’m a little ashamed to tell you so. When the guilt gets too much for me I pop my head in the door and exhale, “Hi how are you doing things went well today I’m sure praying for you.”

The last part is a lie. I gave up on praying long ago.

When I was a kid, Mom had the voice of an angel when she sang me to sleep at night. I close my eyes just right and I can almost hear her whistling in the kitchen, crushing stale bread with the rolling pin, cracking two eggs, then mixing it all together with raw hamburger and a diced onion.

Half an hour later she would place a steaming patty before us. New York chefs would kill for her recipe.

She was meticulous with housework, was my mother. Once I watched her clean the outside edges of our bathroom mirror with a toothbrush, then taper the ends of a toilet roll like they do in fancy hotels.

I don’t know where she got the idea, for although she maintained a passport she never went anywhere. Not to a fancy hotel, not on a bus ride, not even on an airplane.

She loved to visit the city, though, loved to run her fingers over finery we could never afford, before taking my father’s hand and telling him she didn’t need these linens, just wanted to remember that they existed.

She taught Sunday school to third graders who were even known to listen.

She taught me about Jesus and the Bible and all things spiritual, and for a time I came to believe in them entirely and without question.

She taught me to make my bed and how to hold the pillow with my teeth when I slipped on a fresh pillow cover.

She used to knit socks and sweaters and slippers with two needles and a purple ball of yarn. I could never determine if she did this out of necessity or enjoyment, for she rarely smiled while knitting.

She didn’t agree with much of Pastor Frank’s book and she was not reluctant to tell us so. She was rebel enough to snap on earrings whenever we left town, and she loved jazz music. Loved dancing around the living room to Duke Ellington’s Concerto for Cootie, playing it over and over until even I had tired of it.

Then came the clumsy gait and the slowness of speech and the doctor’s prognosis. More recently the speech has dried up altogether. You can’t get a word out of her now as she lies in her linen prison, curled up or stretched out, gazing at us as if she longs to tell us a secret.

It’s taken me awhile to make any sense of these things, to put them together, and now that I’m a man, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that if there’s a God at all, He’s not on our planet. Even if he was, he has no time on his schedule to visit the likes of the Anderson family. I don’t know what else you can conclude when your fervent prayers bounce off the stippled ceilings and echo in your ears night after night, year after year. Oh, I still go to church and I nod my head in all the right places. But one thing is sure, I get through high school and I’m out of here like a ham at a Bar Mitzvah, out to see how the other side of the world lives, outside this stifling greenhouse. To me this is a boring little place where nothing much happens and few would notice if it did.

The best place for this town is in my rearview mirror.

e

There is one thing that flies in the face of all my reasonings. It’s my mechanic father. If angels walk the earth, surely he is one of them. I have watched his way with my mother and I have no explanation for his unflinching love.

How does a man care for an invalid without complaint year after awful year, feeding her with a boyish grin on his face, helping her down her cocktail of medications three times a day, carrying her to the bathroom like it’s a privilege every husband should have? I can find no mortal answer for his attitude. More and more in recent days the unexplainable has become commonplace around him. It’s not only his uncanny ability to predict bad weather, it is his rich tenor voice. When I was twelve he couldn’t carry a tune on a stretcher, but after another of his customary miracles he’s singing solos at church, the richness of his voice bringing tears to the most hardened among us, sometimes even me.

Dad’s ability at predicting storms has me puzzled as to why he doesn’t replace old Fifty-fifty Wiens, the weatherman down at KRUD radio.

It also makes me wonder what he was doing on our mansard roof that particular night. I knew he was bolting an antenna up there so Mom could listen to shortwave radio programs from places like Quito, Equator, but his timing was ridiculous. I asked if he needed my help, but he insisted on going it alone. Still I sneaked out to watch him, becoming alarmed as I watched clouds the color of rotten cantaloupes circle for attack. I’ve seen my father do some dumb things before, but few ranked higher than this one. He was fiddling with some wires when the rain began to fall, and was hammering the antenna into place when the rain started bouncing off the rooftop.

Dad suddenly lost his footing. I gaped wide-eyed and helpless as he gripped a thin strand of wire with one hand and tried to steady himself with the other. The wire was not enough of course—a child cannot hope for a miracle every time—but what happened next was unthinkable. Dad skidded completely off the roof only to land with remarkable grace on a 12-foot scaffold.

At least that’s what it sounded like when I heard the clunk of his feet as they touched down upon it.

I decided then and there to tell no one for fear they would laugh at me, but there was no scaffold that night. I checked the next morning for tracks and they did not exist. Still I clearly saw him hovering there, ten feet above the ground. I kid you not. Then he began to chuckle. And after looking around to make sure no one was watching, my father started to dance.

I concealed myself lest he see me during this holy moment for I knew not what to say. As he descended the invisible scaffold, I fully expected feathers to drop from beneath his shirt as the final proof that he was not of this earth.

I later summoned the nerve to tell this to my buddy Michael Swanson, but he just stared at me, wondering when my medication would kick in.

e

            Religion is a big thing on our side of the creek. You see it on bumper stickers and sidewalks if you poke your head out a window for half a second on any given Sunday. Whole families saunter hand in hand along our streets heading for one of three churches, either Our Lady of Sorrows, Grace Baptist, or Grace Community, the latter being ours.

            Along about the springtime of my fifteenth year I realized that I was unable to believe the things the rest of them believed. Don’t get me wrong, I respect these people and their faith, but I’ve come to the realization that there are too many questions, too many inconsistencies in their Christian faith that they don’t address or even recognize.

            Besides, if you were handed a bathing suit or a straitjacket, which would you slip on?

            I’d prefer no one know my secret, that no one learns I’ve turned my back on my parents’ God. It would break their hearts, and they’ve had enough things broken already.

I suppose they’ve tried their best to insulate us against the world in this little greenhouse. Against evil. Against the unexpected. But surprises lurk here, too. Like rocks in a wheatfield—they’re better left buried. But the big ones have a way of loosening the ground and popping up their heads, or so it seems this summer of my eighteenth year. 

[Introduction] [Chapter 1] [Chapter 2]